Recently, while working with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, an opportunity came up for us at MuleSoft to take on open-source community work to improve the Ubuntu Tomcat 6 package. Having spent several years administering the most popular Tomcat Internet Relay Chat channel, I’ve gathered lots of feedback from Tomcat users about what they had difficulty with, and the changes I had to offer turned into implementation work.
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The new stable release of Tomcat 6.0.24 represents six months of open source software development. Version 6.0.24 includes a small number of new features, plus a large amount of important bug fixes and enhancements. This release is an incremental bug fix release, but the number of fixes included in this release is high. (more…)

ObjectWatch has put out a report titled The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity. They estimate that we are losing $500 billion per month in IT failures. That’s a scary number. If this rate of failure continues, business confidence in IT will diminish.

A couple of points in the report caught my eye, as they are applicable to the points we have been discussing over the last several months.

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For those of you who are using Apache Tomcat in QA, staging, or production, I have no doubt that periodically you end up in the situation where you need to configure Tomcat’s server.xml, catalina.properties, logging.properties, and/or other Tomcat configuration files so that your webapps run the way you need them to run. Even though Tomcat allows us to configure the webapp’s <Context> in a separate file from server.xml, and even though Tomcat allows context.xml in the webapp’s META-INF directory that can be bundled as part of the webapp, that’s almost never enough to configure everything that the webapp needs. The <Context> tag by itself is just not self-contained to the point where you don’t also have to configure other important things in Tomcat’s server.xml to go along with your webapp’s <Context> configuration. (more…)

The public beta phase is now complete — Tcat Server 6 R1 is now released!

Thanks for all of the help and feedback you gave us during the public beta. We learned quite a bit about what you, the Apache Tomcat community, want in the form of an Enterprise Tomcat server. We made many important changes, added some features, and did a lot of testing.

During the public beta, one thing we learned from your feedback was that a significant percent of your production Tomcat instances are still Tomcat version 5.5, which was a very good release branch of Tomcat. It had significant performance enhancements over 5.0, in addition to memory footprint reductions, and more. We’re not surprised to see many Tomcat 5.5 instances still dutifully serving the web. For these reasons, we’ve added full support for Tomcat 5.5 in the first GA release of Tcat Server — it now supports stable versions of Tomcat 6.0 and Tomcat 5.5. This means a single Tcat Server console installation can control and monitor a mixed set of Tomcat server instance versions, spanning different operating systems both old and new.

Some very important additional features we’ve just released include:

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Several years ago, I moved into Product Management, and progressively my time writing code has diminished. Hanging out with the super smart developers at MuleSoft has made me realize how much I missed the days of writing code. So I wanted to get back to doing some code, and what better way to do it than to write a few JSPs? JSPs are easy to write, and you get instant gratification as well.

I wrote a simple JSP that extracts data from an XML file, and it was working fine. When I showed it to the developers, they laughed and told me that I could make the code a lot simpler by using XPath. Sure enough, XPath looked easy enough to use, and I started refactoring my JSP. But during this process, I ran into a nasty bug. It seemed like once in a while, the JSP did not return forever. As any newbie developer would do, I immediately blamed the problem on the XML libraries I am using and started Googling for a solution. Unable to find a solution, I turned to Tcat Server to get diagnostic data. (more…)

It’s a very good thing that Tomcat is open source software. Because it is open, it enjoys broad stand-alone adoption, plus it has been incorporated as part of many other application server products, both commercial and open source. Why reinvent the wheel when Tomcat works great as a generic web container, and the source code is free? Many smart application server teams have chosen to embed Tomcat as their web container. They pull a copy of the Tomcat source code that they know works well, put it into their own source tree, and hook Tomcat’s Ant build system into their own, and rebuild Tomcat as part of their project. (more…)

I often get questions about how to tune Tomcat for better performance.  It is usually best to answer this only after first spending some time understanding the installation of Tomcat, the web site’s traffic level, and the web applications that it runs.  But, there are some general performance tips that apply regardless of these important details.  In general, Tomcat performs better when you:

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Launching Tcat Server was a new type of challenge for MuleSoft. How do we take something that everyone knows — Apache Tomcat – and differentiate it with the enterprise features that our customers were asking for?

We started with a set of principles that would help us deliver this value. These included: (more…)

Silicon Valley Code Camp 2009 is coming up quickly. It will be held on October 3rd and 4th at Foothill College in Los Altos, CA. I attended last year and found the talks to be very informative and the attendees really engaged. It’s a great format, open to anyone and free to anyone who pre-registers. Last year there was a real mix of topics and this year they are introducing tracks to help guide attendees.

I decided to submit a session this year and will be talking about dead-simple integration for web app development. (more…)